Category Archives: Healthcare

Cost Shifting In Healthcare

Posted on March 30, 2013 by alsanblog

One popular idea in healthcare policy has been that providers, such as hospitals, make up for low Medicare prices by charging more for the services they provide to private insurers. This is called cost shifting and hospitals and the insurance … Continue reading →

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Demand Competition In Healthcare

Posted on March 16, 2013 by alsanblog

Wise Boy (aka Ezra Klein) and other members of the Big Government priesthood often claim there is no evidence that competition can control healthcare costs. Although it’s true that many healthcare markets may be less competitive than they should be, … Continue reading →

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Raising The Medicare Eligibility Age Would Not Increase Costs

Posted on March 6, 2013 by alsanblog

In Medicare discussions, the suggestion arises from time to time that we could reduce federal spending by raising the Medicare eligibility age, for example, from 65 to 67. The popular liberal response (see e.g., this Kaiser Family Foundation report) is that raising Medicare’s eligibility age actually … Continue reading →

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More Medicare Is Not The Answer

Posted on February 27, 2013 by alsanblog

Matthew Yglesias is again misrepresenting Medicare, advocating that more of it is the answer to high healthcare prices. As Steven Brill has pointed out, tightening the antitrust laws is the real answer to the problem (although Brill may not really believe his own … Continue reading →

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Break Up The Big Hospitals

Posted on February 26, 2013 by alsanblog

In his Time magazine cover story, Steven Brill criticized the prices that M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston charges patients. In an op-ed piece appearing in the Wash-ington Post, a couple of the hospital’s doctors step forward evidently to defend their employer against Brill’s criticism. And no … Continue reading →

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Healthcare Prices

Posted on February 25, 2013 by alsanblog

In his lengthy cover article for Time magazine, Steven Brill argues that the first question in the healthcare policy debate should be “why are the bills so high,” rather than blowing past that issue to ask who should pay. Most of his … Continue reading →

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Collective Action Without Big Government

Posted on February 11, 2013 by alsanblog

During his second inaugural speech, Obama called for more “collective action” on the part of the American people, and in the process, knocked down a straw man by which he implied that those who disagree with him cling to a theory of individual action that is … Continue reading →

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Wishful Thinking About Healthcare Costs

Posted on January 23, 2013 by alsanblog

Liberals are counting on Obamacare to generate efficiencies that they believe will contain healthcare costs. One of the more celebrated initiatives is the adoption of electronic medical records, but hold on, the significant efficiencies expected from electronic record keeping might not be forthcoming after all. According … Continue reading →

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Defragmenting Healthcare

Posted on January 12, 2013 by alsanblog

Einer Elhauge, a healthcare expert at Harvard University, argues that we can lower healthcare costs and cut the deficit by “defragmenting” the system, by which he means replacing small group physician practices with large companies that combine hospitals and salaried physi-cians, similar to … Continue reading →

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Misrepresenting Medicare

Posted on December 12, 2012 by alsanblog

Liberals seem to be reading from the same broken script with respect to Medicare costs. First, Ruth Marcus and Ezra Klein claim that Medicare costs are “lower than those of private insur-ers” (here and here) and now Matthew Yglesias claims that every dollar the federal govern-ment … Continue reading →

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